


Ignus Fatuus

by perletwo



Category: The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Community: ccbingo, Gen, gratuitous philosophizing, implied mental anguish
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-04-29
Updated: 2012-04-29
Packaged: 2017-11-04 12:19:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 789
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/393768
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/perletwo/pseuds/perletwo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Phil Coulson has always believed in ghosts. But he's never been afraid of them, until now.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ignus Fatuus

**Author's Note:**

> For ccbingo Round 2, Phobias; prompt 39, Phasmophobia: Fear of ghosts

Phil Coulson always believed in an afterlife. From earliest childhood it never even occurred to him there might be a question about it. 

It was obvious to him that while humans were animals just like any other species of mammal, humanity had something in it other species didn’t have going on within them. Something made a single human a very different creature than a thousand interchangeable white lab rats, however close science might say that human and the mice are. With humans the muscle and bone were wrapped around something intangible at the core, something that made every human different from any other, something that separated humanity from the beasts of the earth.

His middle-class Protestant upbringing taught him that something was bestowed upon Adam and Eve by God, a blessing without reservation, until Eve’s betrayal forced him to put conditions upon it. As he grew older and more learned he came to doubt many of those teachings and to look upon most of Genesis as mere mythology.

But he never doubted that people had souls, and however they got them, whether divinely bestowed or some lucky turning of genetic keys in the double helix, it seemed plain to him that such an energy couldn’t just stop – the body died, sure, but the soul had to go _somewhere._

Where, he had no idea; and the more baroquely detailed theories of Heavens and Hells, the less he was inclined to believe what he was reading. But – somewhere. 

So, as a corollary, Coulson never had any trouble believing in ghosts. If souls have to go somewhere, why shouldn’t some of them stay right here? Either to work out some issue left over from life, or to wreak the havoc of a childish tantrum, or just to linger on in sorrow. Or just to be here because here is where they wanted to be; who knew?

He didn’t have the eagerness to believe one found in the credulous. Nor did he claim any special senses or insight into the dead, or even any particular curiosity about them. He was content to let sleeping ghosts lie.

Coulson grew to be an adult who walked with death close at hand at all times. He worked his way through war zones and battlefields and risky intelligence operations and survived two decades of it with only minimal injury. He watched friends die, he ordered them to take lives, he took lives himself. He ordered friends to march to their deaths, even knowing how it would end.

In his adult belief system, which bore the imprint of intense military training and conditioning, these things were within the bounds of acceptable losses. He grieved, he raged, he went through the whole Kubler-Ross five-step at appropriate levels and at the appropriate times, and then he let those things go.

He was not afraid of ghosts. He had squared all those things within his soul, and he was not afraid of the thought of facing any one of the people he’d lost, or killed. Or facing all of them, come to that.

It was not until his fifth decade that Phil Coulson learned there was a dark side to the notion of life after death. Not until he found himself paired off with a sniper – a rude, mouthy, arrogant, uncouth younger man with preternaturally accurate aim, bone-deep simple human decency, and a bottomless well of courage if not always common sense.

Learning about Clint Barton’s life before SHIELD, the textures and details that didn’t appear in words in a file folder, was for Coulson a matter of first identifying and then slowly, carefully tweezing out the splinters in his psyche. It might make him feel better in the end, but the process itself was torture for both.

Through this process he came to understand that death had always been as near to hand for Clint as it had for him. But for Clint it was never the sad but benign necessity of Coulson’s view. Death crashed into Clint’s world randomly and without warning, obliterating those in its path and launching deadly shrapnel and shockwaves for miles around. It was bloody and mangling and rank with horror. 

Clint found the same justifications for death in a military structure that Coulson had long accepted. But beyond those years, back in the dark times of his youth, the shadows of his memory, the specters of Clint’s dead screamed like banshees, clawed for a finger-hold on his psyche. They woke him in the night in cold sweats; they darkened his eyes and stilled his restless tongue when he finally passed from ‘drinking too much’ to the outer reaches of drunkenness.

It took loving someone else to teach Phil Coulson to be afraid of ghosts.


End file.
